Page 60 of A Baby for the Duke

“I had five, and you had none. If I finish this game, I will be obliged to come back next Tuesday and beat your brothers again, which will be tedious for everybody.” He closed her fingers around the lot of them. “You have five now. That is more than anybody. Congratulations, Duchess.”

There was silence for about a second and a half. Then Leonora dropped every one of them on the grass and threw both arms round his neck.

Colin went rigid.

She was soaking herself against his wet shirt and did not appear to notice. She was laughing into his collarbone and saying something about nine years, and behind her Alexander was applauding and Augusta was squealing and her mother was crying.

He had no idea where to put his hands.

Eventually, he put them on her back.

He stood there with water in his boots and his wife’s face in his neck, and thought, with the particular clarity that came just before the ground tilted: Oh, there it is.

“We should go,” he said into her hair. “You’re wet through. We’ll both catch our deaths.”

It took another forty minutes to get the baby back, which involved a great deal of protest from the Marchioness.

It took Augusta rather less time to go round the lawn on her hands and knees and collect five wet wooden balls out of the grass, and to present them to her sister at the carriage step with the air of a woman delivering the crown jewels, and to point out that Evan had tried to take one.

They were quiet in the carriage. Katherine slept the whole way with her fist round Leonora’s finger.

“Did you have a good time?” Leonora asked, somewhere past the tenth milestone.

“Yes.”

“Truthfully?”

“Yes.” Colin looked out the window at the hedgerows blurring past. “Thank you.”

She smiled and did not push it, which he was learning was a thing she did, and leaned her head back against the squabs.

It was only when they arrived at Thorton that he noticed she had not taken her hands out of her sleeves for the last six miles, and that her cheeks were far too bright, and that the baby, asleep on her shoulder, was breathing fast and hot against her neck.

CHAPTER 20

Mrs. Pike met them in the hall with the face of a magistrate.

“You are wet.”

“I am aware,” Colin said.

“You are wet to the thighs, Your Grace, and Her Grace has been sitting in a carriage with you for two hours in the state you’re in. Peg! Hot water in both rooms. Bess, take the child.”

“She’s asleep.”

“She’ll wake for a bath and go down again. She’s soaked where Her Grace has been holding her, and I’ll not have her in a wet gown all night.”

Leonora surrendered Katherine, who woke, objected, and was carried off nonetheless.

“Your housekeeper,” she said when the hall was empty, “has just told you off in front of your wife.”

“She has been doing it since I was four.”

“She was magnificent.”

“She was insubordinate.”

“She was both. That is the only way anybody in this house gets anything done, and you have known it for thirty years.” Leonora shook out her skirts, which were damp all down the front where a wet baby had slept on her for twenty-two miles, and discovered that she did not particularly want to go upstairs. “Where are my balls?”